Bookstores are full of self-help books. There are a lot of parlour games to be played, which you can often buy at the same stores you find the self-help books.
But the most telling self-help parlour game is not a game or a book. It is a questionnaire. Not the kind you filled in at the doctor’s office. Or at school, when searching for a career or an aptitude.
The questionnaire I am referring to is the back page of Vanity Fair magazine since 1993, adopted by its grey-maned Canadian editor Graydon Carter. It is called the Proust Questionnaire, even though Proust didn’t invent it.
If you do it yourself you will soon conclude that it is no easy thing. To really answer the questions, really and truly answer the questions, is devastatingly difficult. Your answers may be very hard to come up with, and even harder to accept. You may find that you do not want to show them to anyone.
The story is that a young Marcel Proust discovered the questionnaire in his teens, when a socialite friend held out her red leather-bound book and asked him to complete it. Antoinette Faure was part of the Parisian literary circle Proust frequented, and the daughter of a future Président de la République, Félix Faure. She maintained a kind of confession album she called "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." containing a list of questions. She asked all those who visited her to answer the same list of about two dozen queries about the most basic things:
Your idea of misery; your favourite qualities in a man; your favourite qualities in a woman; your main fault; your idea of happiness; what you hate the most; if you could change one thing about yourself what would it be; and so on.
Proust filled out the questionnaire at least twice – once at age 13 and again at 20. His responses were published in 1892 in La Revue Illustrée XV. The celebrated French television host Bernard Pivot adopted the questionnaire, shortened it and asked his television guests to answer it. James Lipton of Inside the Actor’s Studio used it to great effect on his many celebrity guests.
Over the years the Vanity Fair questionnaires have piled up, and in 2009, Condé Nast published a collection of the best of them in book form. Here are a few gems:
Arnold Schwarzenegger on the lowest depth of misery: "Did you read the reviews for Last Action Hero?" He also admitted that he is "a major shoe queen" and confessed that his greatest fear is not the wrath of the scorned Kennedy clan, but that he is "petrified of bikini waxing," after a bad experience in 1978. Ever the body builder.
Jane Fonda on the one thing she would change about herself: "My inability to have a long-term intimate relationship."
Hedy Lamarr, aged 85, said that she would like to die "preferably after sex." Hmmmm.
The most overrated virtue, according to numerous contributors? Virginity.
Many admitted that death is their biggest fear. Larry King, who survived a heart attack, said, "Trust me, I saw no lights, no angels -nothing."
Elaine May, the comedian, answered that the phrases she most overuses are "You’re kidding" and "Oh, fuck" and "Oh, fuck, you’re kidding."
When I asked Michael Ignatieff some of the Proust Questionnaire during an on-stage interview, he played along, and paused when I asked him what his greatest fear was. He then said, obviously pained, that it was Alzheimer’s, the disease that took his mother’s memory and eventually her life. Ignatieff wrote a tender and harrowing book about it called Scar Tissue.
There are many versions of the questionnaire. The questions have been changed and sharpened. In this month’s edition of Vanity Fair, three of Hollywood’s leading men and alpha males answered the questionnaire: Matt Damon, Daniel Craig and George Clooney.
Clooney says the living person he most admires is his father, and the one thing he would change about his family is to make them young again. His perfect happiness is laughter. Clooney is Hollywood’s über beefcake, and his latest movie, The Descendants, was a big disappointment. His answers give a clue as to why. Clooney has no real sense of what it is to be a grown-up, or try to, and have responsibility for others, especially kids. He has said that The Descendants is his best work. I thought it was a soap opera that members of the 1 percent with no real idea of what real life is would love. Clooney is a true Peter Pan, and it shines through in his answers.
Matt Damon’s perfect happiness is his children (he has four girls), happy and within arm’s reach. The living person he most admires is Nelson Mandela (a frequent choice for stars who do the quiz), and the thing he most dislikes is social injustice. I have a big soft spot for Damon, who may not be all that deep, but who is a real mensch. He is a classic small-l liberal.
Daniel Craig’s idea of perfect happiness is being awake at dawn with nothing to do. He is happiest at a free bar. His idea of the lowest form of misery is gastric flu on a plane. If he could come back as a person or thing it would be as krill. The living person he most admires is Aung Sung Suu Kyi. And when asked on what occasion he lies, he said "when answering questionnaires."
